Research Methods and Statistics in Psychology

S Alexander Haslam, Craig McGarty

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781526453792
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

The third edition ofHaslam and McGarty?sbest-selling textbook, Research Methods and Statistics in Psychology, provides students with a highly readable and comprehensive introduction to conducting research in psychology. The book guides readers through the range of choices involved indesign, analysis, and presentation and is supplemented by a range of practical learning features both inside the book and online. These draw on the authors? extensive experience as frontlineresearchers and provide step-by-step guides to quantitative and qualitative methods and analyses. Written in an accessible and engaging style, this text encouragesdeep engagement with its subject matter and isdesigned to inspire students to feelpassionate forthe research process as a whole.

This third edition offers:

• Updated 'Research Bites' in every chapter: a space to step back from the text and reflect on the ways in which it relates both to issues in the world at large and to contemporary debates in psychology
• Updated coverage of experimental design, surveyresearchand ethics
• More expansive coverage of qualitative methods
• A comprehensive guide to the process of conducting psychological research from the ground up — coveringmultiple methodologies, experimental and survey design, data analysis, ethics, and report writing
• An extensive range of quantitative methods together with detailed step-by-step guides to running analyses using SPSS
• Online resources and videos to help reinforce learning and revision for instructors and students.

1 Introduction

Key goals for this chapter

1. Explain the purpose of this book.
2. Explain the book’s structure and how to use it.
3. Motivate readers to engage with the book’s goals and to read on.

‘Why do I have to do this?’

Students are typically drawn to study psychology out of a sense of curiosity. They are interested in questions like ‘What makes people love or hate each other?’, ‘How does our mind solve difficult problems?’ and ‘How do children develop a sense of morality?’. Such questions are potentially among the most interesting that can be explored in any academic setting. Not surprisingly, most students quickly find out that these and many other psychological topics can be fascinating to learn about and investigate.

The same can rarely be said for a student’s first course on research methodology or statistics. When embarking on these courses most students often just ask themselves ‘Why do I have to do this?’. The question is asked partly out of genuine confusion, but also with a sense of foreboding – the study of methodology and statistics has the reputation for being dull, difficult and distressing. Few things have the same reputation for making people both bored and fearful at the same time.

Despite these concerns, the people responsible for laying down the guidelines for teaching in psychology continue to demand that students endure the trials and tribulations of a training in research methodology and statistics. Why spoil the fun? Why expose students to material that they may dislike and may turn them off studying psychology altogether?

It may be comforting to conclude that academic psychologists are sadists. Some probably are. But academics have little to gain from making students’ lives miserable just for the sake of it. Nowadays almost all academic departments are keen to attract and retain as many students as possible. Accordingly, a number of very good reasons need to be put forward to encourage perseverance with material that many find difficult. So what are they? As we see it, the case for asking (indeed, demanding) psychology students to come to grips with issues of methodology and statistics rests on the following points.

First, it needs to be emphasized that one of the key transformations that students of psychology undergo in the course of their study is from being consumers of psychological knowledge to being producers of it. Before coming to university, most budding psychologists (like most other members of the general community) have been exposed to a range of relevant research. Psychology is the stuff of everyone’s lives and for this reason it provides excellent material for television, radio, newspapers, blogs and everyday conversation. In the formal media, journalists and commentators give us neatly packaged versions of the psychology of prejudice, fear, stress, physical attraction, memory, leadership, and so on. Yet a key part of a person’s academic training as a psychologist is to be able to participate actively in the research process. This role involves more than just supporting or challenging different versions of psychological truth with opinions and beliefs (something that any intelligent person should be able to do). It means being able to do so on the basis of carefully gathered and critically tested scientific evidence. Clearly we cannot do this unless we understand how to gather and how to test that evidence.

A second reason for studying methodology and statistics is related to the first. In order to understand and evaluate research conducted and reported by others, we need to have some insight into the procedures and assumptions by which their work has been guided. We may be suspicious of a person who uses a survey to make claims that eating a particular food will improve eyesight, or who concludes on the basis of an experiment that wearing a particular brand of jeans will make us more attractive to members of the opposite sex. By fully understanding the strengths and limitations of the research methods they have used we can find out whether our suspicions are well founded. Indeed, we can be fairly sure that it is precisely because so many people do not have this type of understanding that a great deal of important research continues to be misunderstood. It is also because so few people really understand these issues that certain research strategies continue to have appeal for those who want to use research to conceal truth rather than reveal it.

Photos 1.1 and 1.2 In our daily lives, we are exposed to people’s theories of psychology all the time – as we strive to understand and explain our own behaviour and that of other people. Training in psychological research methods should allow you to interrogate the quality of these theories and to reflect critically on their utility and value.

If the above reasons seem too idealistic and abstract, then a third reason is purely pragmatic. If you are reading this book you are likely to have one of two futures in mind. Either you are going to become a psychologist (in which case you will actually be doing research in the near future) or you are going to get a job where your psychological training will be very useful. In both cases, the ability to conduct, analyse and interpret psychological research is likely to serve you well. Indeed, of all the skills that a degree in psychology should impart, these are probably the most useful – and therefore the most marketable.

Of course psychology is not the only discipline that trains students to use research methods and statistics. However, because psychology students approach these issues in an attempt to understand human behaviour, their expertise has a general and much sought-after relevance. This expertise is particularly relevant in fields such as advertising, marketing, teaching, politics, policy making and in almost all managerial and executive roles.

Research Bite 1.1

The importance of a hungry mind

An analysis by Sophie von Stumm, Benedikt Hell, and Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic (2011) sought to identify the best predictors of academic performance. Unsurprisingly perhaps, a person’s intelligence was the best predictor. However, they also found that this was matched by the combined predictive power of effort and intellectual curiosity. They conclude that succeeding in academic fields (such as psychology) is not just a question of being smart and trying hard, it is also about having a hungry mind. This, they note, is consistent with Samuel Johnson’s observation that ‘curiosity is, in great and generous minds, the first passion and the last’.

Reference: Von Stumm, S., Hell, B., & Chamorro-Premuzic, T. (2011). The hungry mind: Intellectual curiosity is the third pillar of academic performance. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 6, 574–588.

This is not to say that studying research methodology and statistics will get you a well-paid job, or that you would necessarily want a job in which this knowledge played a central role. However, taking the above three points together, we believe that this knowledge should enhance your ability to make reasonable inferences about human behaviour and to evaluate critically the inferences drawn by others. These are probably the most directly applicable skills that can be imparted and developed through the study of psychology as a whole.

Finally, though, we would like to think that acquiring and mastering these skills could actually be intellectually rewarding and stimulating in itself. In light of the gloomy expectations with which you may have started reading this book, this may seem to be a tall order. A major objective of this book is to make the idea seem a little less outrageous than it might otherwise have been.

The structure of this book and an overview of the chapters

In writing this book, our broad objective has been to make studying research methodology and statistics a positive experience. So in order to get our points across we have tried to use words and figures rather than numbers and equations wherever possible. At the same time, though, we would stress that it is not easy to do good psychological research. For that reason you may find some of the material that we have to deal with quite challenging.

Some people might suggest that one way to make the book more readable would be to take out all the numbers, all the equations, all the technical procedures and all the jargon. You may think this is a very attractive proposition. However, it will not be much help when you need to apply your knowledge, or when you progress to more advanced courses in which familiarity with this material is essential. Although the technical jargon we deal with can be hard to understand at first, mastery of it will ultimately make it much easier for you to communicate with other psychological researchers.

In this book we aim to provide a comprehensive examination of the research process. We have structured the chapters so that they present an ever-sharpening focus on the various aspects of research. We begin by asking very general questions about research motives and objectives. We then work through the main strategies that can be employed to reach those objectives. After this, we go on to consider the key statistical techniques typically associated with each strategy. Finally, we consider ways of doing research that do not involve statistics.

In this way, we address in sequence the key questions that are raised at different stages in the research enterprise: from the general (‘What am I trying to do here?’) to the specific (‘How confident can I be that two groups of people really are different?’). We have outlined the structure of the next eight chapters in Figure 1.1.

Figure 1.1 The structure of Chapters 2–9

In Chapter 2 we consider why people are motivated to conduct psychological research in the first place and the broad goals they set themselves when they do. We also identify properties that are generally considered the hallmark of good research and that are therefore most prized by members of the research community. Not surprisingly, because these properties can be viewed as prescriptions for research practice (effectively telling researchers what they should and should not aim for), there is controversy about their appropriateness and utility. For example, although we strongly endorse the view that psychology is a science, this scientific status is neither unproblematic (what does it mean?) nor uncontested (is it really?). In this chapter we outline these and other controversies, and some of the major camps into which researchers fall.

In Chapter 3 we discuss the main strategies that researchers employ to address different types of research question. We start by looking at precisely what psychologists measure and observe in their research, and at the basis and consequences of measurement decisions. We then look at the aims of measurement in experimental, quasi-experimental, survey and case-study research. We outline the key features of each of these four methods and the kinds of conclusion each allows researchers to draw. We consider the factors that determine when each method is used and discuss the relative strengths and weaknesses of each.

In Chapter 4 we examine the experimental method in detail and explore how experiments are designed and conducted in psychology. In particular, we focus on the choices that using the experimental method involves, their consequences, and the factors to be considered when making them. These choices include decisions about who should participate in a study, what things should be controlled and what should be measured. Similar considerations are also central to Chapter 5, where we look at survey methodology and design. In both chapters we emphasize the types of inference that the various methods allow the researcher to make and consider how features of research design impact on our ability to make particular types of inference.

Chapters 6 to 9 introduce statistical concepts that are essential to almost all psychological research. These will form the backbone of the statistical knowledge that you will need to take from this book into more advanced courses or into a research setting. However, because our aim is to help you become a researcher rather than a mathematician, we generally downplay the algebraic and computational aspects of the statistics we introduce. It is our belief that the main obstacles to becoming a good researcher are conceptual, not mathematical, so it is on overcoming these conceptual problems that we have chosen to expend most of our (and your) energy. For most readers the mathematical (mainly algebraic) skills required to take you through this book will be ones that you acquired at high school (though your memory may need a bit of refreshing). We want to make it clear that statistics are not weapons of torture heralded from some alien world in order to confuse and deceive. Instead they are natural and sensible tools that are used in research (and other) contexts to make certain features of reality easier to grasp.

All the research methods discussed in Chapters 3 to 5 have one feature in common – they ultimately require the collection of research data. The first stage in handling almost all research data involves simply summarizing their most important features. In Chapter 6 we discuss the pro...